Re: [chairs] Subtleties in the OASIS TC Member Attendance Rules

[jon.bosak@sun.com]

It seems that several of us are in agreement on the desirability
of creating an official category for members of a TC mailing list
who are not also members (strictly speaking) of a TC.  The
question is what to call this category.  Scott likes "nonvoting
member" for marketing reasons.  Eduardo and I dislike this
nomenclature because in parliamentary practice (meaning Robert's,
which specifies 99.9 per cent of the rules that govern formal TC
operation) the word "member" means "voting member," "voting
member" is frowned upon as a term containing a redundancy, and
"nonvoting member" is considered to be a contradiction in terms.

I suggest that we try for a category name that does not contain an
internal contradiction but serves better for marketing purposes
than "observer with posting privileges."  How about "participant"?
That would not only serve almost as well as "member" in the resume
scenario but would also have the benefit of truthfully
representing the nature of one's involvement in the process.

Jon

   Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003 13:34:26 -0700
   From: Eduardo Gutentag <Eduardo.Gutentag@sun.com>
   Cc: Jon.Bosak@sun.com, karl.best@oasis-open.org, hlockhar@bea.com,
	   chairs@lists.oasis-open.org

   Seems like I said something that was open to misinterpretation. So,
   just in case, I'd like to clarify that my comment, "What I would like
   to see is for the Kavi process to follow the OASIS TC process and not
   the other way around..." was not meant in any way to disparage the
   participation of observers in the mailing lists. What I did mean,
   though, was that I did not think it was appropriate to munge TC
   participation with mailing list participation; that until very
   recently there was no language separating the two, and those who
   wanted to monitor the lists were invited to join the TCs, thus
   potentially inflating the ranks of the quorum-busters ;). When a
   chair goes to the Add a member section of the roster maintenance
   page, the chair is still told that someone can be added as a member
   of the TC because he/she has qualified according to the rules, which
   is false, and that some ballots may allow only members with voting
   privileges to vote, which is also false, because according to the
   process there are no such ballots, IOW only voting members (which
   is the only kind of *TC* members there are) can vote...

   So it's not that I'm unhappy with the functionality of the mailing
   lists; it the language and lack of differentiation between mailing
   lists and TCs that make me less than happy.

   Scott McGrath wrote:
   > Allow me to toss out a members' perspective, one that has little to do
   > with the strictly technical components of TC participation.
   > 
   > People derive benefits from 
   > 'being a member" of OASIS TCs for a lot of different reasons.  Some such
   > reasons are strictly warm and fuzzy stuff--it makes them feel like an
   > important part of the process. Further, I would wager OASIS TC
   > membership is in more than a few employee performance evaluations, goals
   > etc as a measure of meeting some corporate objective.  
   > 
   > That said, we should be careful not to marginalize or sideline those
   > that can only contribute minimally and cannot commit to travel, meeting
   > attendance, concalls at 3am etc  I think Jon's point is valid, these
   > members are an important part of the process and we should find ways to
   > enable that. (remembering these are dues paying members like all others)
   > 
   > Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of the term non-voting member,
   > I think it serves the above needs well and I think one intuitively knows
   > what these mean.  I think grouping those with some valid input with
   > other non-contributing Observers is less correct than grouping all
   > contributing persons as members, where only those seeking and abiding by
   > the restrictions have voting rights, quorum implications etc.
   > 
   > Scott...
   > 
   > -----Original Message-----
   > From: jon.bosak@sun.com [mailto:jon.bosak@sun.com] 
   > Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2003 2:37 PM
   > To: karl.best@oasis-open.org
   > Cc: Eduardo.Gutentag@sun.com; Jon.Bosak@sun.com; hlockhar@bea.com;
   > chairs@lists.oasis-open.org
   > Subject: Re: [chairs] Subtleties in the OASIS TC Member Attendance Rules
   > 
   > I certainly don't disagree with the premise that the kavi
   > interface should align with the official OASIS TC process, but I
   > am finding the category that allows observers to post on occasion
   > to be extremely useful from an organizational standpoint.  The
   > problem, as I see it, lies in calling this category "nonvoting
   > member," which from a parliamentary standpoint is a contradiction
   > in terms.  The interface should be distinguishing between
   > "read/write" and "read-only" observers rather than between "voting"
   > and "nonvoting" members.
   > 
   > | I'm working an fixes to Kavi to support this, but unfortunately
   > | it's not going well...
   > 
   > Since we're starting to depend fairly heavily on the (badly named)
   > "nonvoting member" category, I'm actually glad to hear that you're
   > not making rapid progress on fixing this....
   > 
   > Jon